Empire's End

by Leila Rasheed

  I was born in the Year of the Five Emperors, and all my life, things had been good in Leptis Magna. The fifth and final emperor – Septimius Severus – who had come to power after the civil wars, had been born in Leptis Magna and he had poured wealth into the city. We had a new triumphal arch, a new basilica, a new forum, new public baths. Tourists came to admire the city that had produced a man brave and clever and ruthless enough to win at the game of power. My father’s greatest boast – and he had plenty of boasts – was that he played marbles with the Emperor when they were boys. He said that even then, Septimius loved winning. It was no surprise when he went off to glory and conquests and my father turned his mind to philosophy and the science of medicine and the arts of Asclepius.

  Once, my father took me to see the Emperor’s triumphal arch. I was his only living child, and he was quite old, so he treated me more like a boy than he might have done otherwise.

  The arch that Septimius Severus had had built to celebrate his victories over the Parthians had taken most of my lifetime to complete. It was enormous – you could see it looming over the city from a long way away, blinding white marble against the cloudless blue sky. It had four entries, and sat over the crossroads, so that people coming from all sides of the city saw it.

  “This arch is the heart of the city,” my father announced proudly. “Every distance from Leptis Magna is measured from this point. When we say it is one hundred miles to Leptis Magna, we mean it is one hundred miles to this spot.”

  Awed, I craned back to try and see it all. Up the sides of the arch, the sculptor had carved coiling grapevines, the symbol of Dionysus who protected our city. There were barbarians, too, on the pillars, with strange clothes and long hair, looking sad and noble and strong.

  The Emperor Septimius Severus was right in the centre of the highest panel. He was in a chariot, flanked by his two sons, Bassianus – who was always called Caracalla – and Geta. As I looked at the sculpture I could almost hear the roaring cheers of the crowd as they drove through Rome. It looked as if they were driving the chariot right out from the arch, trampling over the heads of everyone below them. Winged spirits of victory soared over their heads, dropping crowns of sacred palm leaves onto them.

  “He looks like one of us,” my father said with pride. And he did. He was curly-haired, with a dark face like a fighter, scarred like a dry riverbed by the sun. You could see men just like him setting out to fish from the port of Leptis Magna, or striding down to the baths in the afternoon. Of course, now that he was emperor, everyone tried to look like him even if they did not, but even so, he was clearly a son of Libya. I looked up at the next panel. Dignified and calm, the Emperor grasped the hands of his sons, Caracalla and Geta, who stood beside him. The folds of their togas made them look as solid and safe as three tall stone pillars.

  “It is a great thing that the Emperor has sons to rule after him,” remarked my father.

  “Why?”

  “Well, no one wants to go back to the days of the Year of the Five Emperors,” he said. “You were born in that year, you would not know, but the Empire was torn apart by generals fighting for power.”

  I could not imagine it. I had known peace all my life.

  “Caracalla and Geta will rule together after the Emperor becomes a god,” my father said.

  Becomes a god? That means when he dies, I realised. But you did not speak of the Emperor’s death in public. People would think you were wishing him dead – perhaps that you were even plotting his death.

  “Who was that meant to be?” I asked, to change the subject. I pointed at a man’s figure that stood near to the Emperor. He was also carved in a toga, the folds of stone flowing down. But his head had been sheared off, as if by an axe blow.

  My father sounded uncomfortable for the first time.

  “Oh. . . that was Plautianus. He was a childhood friend of the Emperor, too.”

  “Did you know him? It’s a pity his statue has been damaged. Will it be fixed?”

  “I doubt it,” said my father. Then, as if wanting to speak of something different, he said: “How do you think the stones of the arch stay up?”

  I had never wondered that before. Now I found myself worrying, because I couldn’t see how they were supported.

  “Some sort of wire inside. . .?” I suggested, though I could not imagine what wire could be strong enough to hold up stone. Some of my mother’s jewellery was made of gold wire but it was easy to crumple even just with clumsy fingers.

  He shook his head.

  I looked and looked. I felt as if there must be a secret in plain view.

  After a moment, he told me the secret. “They hold each other up. Do you see? The force of each one holds its neighbours up.”

  “So if one were to be taken out. . .”

  “The whole arch would fall down.”

  As we walked away I craned my neck to look back at the arch. I think my father meant me to be impressed at the skill of the engineers and I was, but I was now more worried that one day, one of the stones would be removed.

  My mother was not a fan of the new Leptis Magna.

  “I liked it better before,” she grumbled quietly, when I came home with stories of how magnificent our new city was.

  “I love it right now!” I said proudly. “Soon we will be just like Rome.”

  “Daddy’s girl,” said my father, and ruffled my hair.

  It was true, I was a Daddy’s girl. I read the books he told me to: Virgil and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius the philosopher-emperor, and even some books that my mother wasn’t to know about, like Galen, the famous doctor. My lyre playing was best not spoken of (or heard), but my geometry was getting better and I was proud of knowing Latin and Greek as well as Punic.

  “Now,” my mother would say, if I ever sounded a bit too pleased with myself, “you have nothing left to do but find a husband who will put up with all this learning.”

  That always stopped my mouth quickly, because I could never imagine wanting to marry – even though, on the day the news came, I was already fourteen years old.

  That day, I had just finished my morning lessons. My tutor – a Greek who taught me and a few other girls together, for a discounted rate – was putting away his writing materials, and my friend Livia and I were playing with the kittens that had been born that spring. They were just old enough to play now with strings and a little ball, chasing it, patting and padding it, and sometimes they would try to catch the fish that swam in the small pool in the impluvium where the rainwater collected in the spring. My mother was out shopping, and my father was giving a public demonstration of surgery in front of the house. We could hear his voice droning on, like bees around flowers. It was sunny, and the ground was warm under our bare feet. Now I often wake up dreaming of that sunshine, crying for it. I hunger for it the way I hunger for my mother’s touch.

  My old nurse was keeping an eye on us, and carding wool, combing and cleaning it as she sat in the shade, her wide lap holding the wool that still smelled of sheep. My mother would later spin the yarn to make clothes for my father and me. Nurse was from the tribe of the Garamantes, the ones who know where the wells and the secret gardens are and how to ride a camel from one side of the waterless desert to the other with only the stars to guide you. She had been enslaved when she was only a girl – not by us, we bought her from a neighbour – and she did not have the faded blue lines that mapped the faces of the other Garamantes women. She would watch them when they were in the market as if she was watching marvellous dreams she longed to enter. Now that she was old, past forty, and I was no longer a child, she wasn’t my nurse any more. Still, I loved her more than my own mother. My mother was not unkind, but she only spoke to me to give me annoying advice or tell me what I was doing wrong. The long hours spent spinning or weaving or doing some other dutiful household task with my mother made me so bored I could have torn my own hair out. With Nurse, I could be sure of someone who would listen and smile no matter what I babbled about. Toda
y, as so often, I was babbling about my mother and how annoying she was.

  “My mother is so nervous these days,” I was saying to Livia. “It’s as if she is expecting bad news.”

  “Perhaps she is.”

  “Well, whether she is or not, she shouldn’t let it show.” Remembering something my father often said, I added, feeling rather smug, “Marcus Aurelius said that we should treat bad news and good news exactly the same—”

  “Now, miss, don’t speak ill of your mother, whatever the philosophers say. You don’t know the whole story,” interrupted Nurse gently.

  “Really?” said Livia, who had recently started acting a little like her own mother: suddenly on her dignity, cold. “What secrets do you think your mistress has, and why would it concern you?”

  “Did I say secrets, miss?” she replied.

  I gave Livia a little push, uncomfortable at the direction in which she was steering things.

  At the time, though, I did think that Nurse meant secrets. I knew that my parents had secrets from me already. I had seen the messengers from Rome come and go in the night, and spotted the pigeons that my father sent flying across the sea. Girls aren’t supposed to ask questions about such things, but you can’t have a father who believes in philosophy and education for girls and not end up with a curious mind. Sometimes I thought, guiltily, that my father had probably only meant me to learn how I should behave as a good Roman woman: brave, chaste, choosing death before dishonour. I was sure he wouldn’t want me wondering about his private business. The trouble was, all those stories of good Roman women seemed a little distant. I didn’t need to choose death before dishonour and there were no wars for me to be brave in; even the Garamantes were peaceful these days. . . What really worried me then was that Livia would choose to make a big scandal out of Nurse’s words, and my mother would have to say she would have Nurse whipped, so as not to lose face in front of Livia’s mother. Of course, we would never whip an old slave, but I cringed at the thought of having to pretend we had.

  Then the kitten fell into the impluvium, and the panic over getting it out before it drowned made us all forget what we were talking about. I remember noticing that the voices from the surgery demonstration had stopped. Now there was silence when before there had been constant, reassuring noise. It was as if someone had taken the sea away.

  “Poor little thing,” we crooned over the kitten. We dried it carefully – it had only been in the water a few seconds – and took it back to its mother for something to drink in the sun. But when we came back, the atmosphere had changed. Nurse was gone, my father was there, and from one look at him I could see that he was near bursting with news. His eyes were shining like marble in the sun. I was amazed. I had never seen him look so excited and happy.

  “Father?” I said.

  “Camilla!” He took my shoulder and smiled – no, grinned – into my face. “Come on, I have news.”

  I followed him, full of excitement, into his office. We did not have the wealthiest house in the city, but it was homely, and my mother had made sure we had the most up-to-date painters to decorate the dining room with scenes of the labours of Hercules and Dionysus riding on a panther. The office was a room I rarely went into. My father’s wooden desk was there, with a stack of letters and writing tablets and, in the corner, his seal and wax. There was also a screen carved out of scented cedar wood, and a mural of Mercury, messenger of the gods, who was a good choice for business. A bust of the Emperor in pink marble was in a niche on the wall, and there were some elegant folding chairs for guests. My mother was already in the room, looking worried as usual.

  My father shut the doors, closing us in the cool shade, and turned to us.

  “It has happened. Finally!” he burst out.

  I stared at him, confused, but my mother’s face fell.

  “You mean—” she began.

  “Yes! The Emperor has summoned me to Rome! We are going home!”

  4.

  Going Home

  “We’re leaving Leptis Magna?” my mother said.

  I was confused. Home was here – this villa, this courtyard, those kittens, the comfortable feel of the mosaic floor beneath my feet.

  My father grasped my hands and spoke directly to me. “You know I lived in Rome as a young man. Well, the Emperor has finally remembered his childhood friend! He has called for me personally. We are going back to Rome – to the centre of the world, Camilla! The only place that matters!”

  “Rome!” I was thrilled. I squeezed my father’s hands. I had never been to Rome; I’d only heard people talk of it. If they had been there they sounded lordly and superior, and if they had not they spoke of it with longing and jealousy. Rome – the centre of the world! The home of the Emperor himself! The heart of the Empire!

  My mother had found a smile by now. Her next words took mine away.

  “At last, we can conclude things with Publius,” she said to my father. “It will be a joy to me to see my daughter honourably and safely settled.”

  I dropped my father’s hands.

  “You mean marry? Me, marry?” I said.

  My mother smiled at me.

  “You will finally be a grown woman,” she said softly. “We are so proud.”

  I nodded uncertainly. I knew, of course, that I was engaged to be married. So was Livia, and so were most of my friends. I had a ring that my mother kept in a box in her room, which I had been given as a betrothal token. But the boy – Publius Maecenas – was in Rome, so far away, or so it had seemed until now. I had assumed that the engagement had been forgotten, that when I married it would be someone from Leptis Magna. We had met just once, when his family had visited Leptis Magna for the betrothal ceremony when I was only six. But now I was fourteen. I didn’t remember him at all. I searched my memory and came up with a vague idea of soft brown eyes, freckles and knobbly elbows.

  “Fourteen is young,” said my father, as if reading my mind. “But at least you can get to know each other.”

  I realised, the thought flying through my mind like a swallow dipping in and out of the eaves, that this was what all the messages, the secrets, had been leading up to. This invitation to Rome had not come out of nowhere. My father had been working towards it, perhaps begging the Emperor to invite him, perhaps speaking to others who had the Emperor’s ear, just as I wheedled my mother’s maid when I wanted some little toy or jewel and my mother was doubtful. And the end of it was that we were all going to Rome.

  And I was going to get married.

  “His family are well-born and rich,” my mother said. “It is a good marriage for a doctor’s daughter from the provinces.”

  “You forget that we are friends of the Emperor,” my father replied. “Being from the provinces is no longer a disadvantage, when the Emperor himself speaks Latin with a Leptis Magna accent.”

  Married, I thought. I would be a grown woman. With a household of my own. That didn’t sound so bad. Still, I had a thousand thoughts and fears. What would it be like being married? Would I enjoy being a grown woman? And what about, well. . . having babies? What if – an even more worrying thought – I could not have babies? I knew some women could not, and it seemed to make them very sad, for they spent much time and money coming to my father and then going to different temples and even sailing to faraway places where the gods had been said to work miracles. If I could not have children, what would I do all day? Would my husband divorce me? I realised that I had gone from not thinking of Publius at all to marrying him and divorcing him in less than a minute.

  “Can I go on with my studies?” I asked my father.

  He patted my head. “Yes, of course. There is no need for you to marry in a rush. Take your time. See how you like each other. I expect you will like each other very much!”

  “It is best for girls to marry early,” my mother said gently. “She is nearly fifteen after all.”

  “The philosophers disagree,” my father replied, and my mother could say no more.

&nb
sp; I skipped out to tell Nurse the news.

  “We’re going to Rome! Rome itself!”

  Nurse was bending over the basket of wool, and she didn’t look up. I was disappointed.

  “Nurse! Didn’t you hear? We’re all going to Rome! You too!”

  When she did look up, I searched her face for the excitement I expected her to feel. I did not find it.

  “Nurse?” I said uncertainly.

  “To Rome?” she said, and her voice sounded blank and empty. “Must I go to Rome?”

  “Of course!” I laughed aloud. “Of course you must come to Rome with us. We would not leave you here.”

  I flung my arms around her neck and hugged her. She had fed me as a baby, put me to sleep every night. She had even given me a little amulet, a spell written on papyrus and contained in a reed, which I wore tied around my wrist all the time. It was a good-luck spell from a priest of Isis, meant to keep me safe from illness. Every time I looked at it, it reminded me of how much she loved me.

  “I’m going to be married,” I whispered into her ear. The amulet dug into my wrist as I hugged her. “You can come and live with me in my new house, in Rome. It’s the greatest city in the world!”

  Then I ran off to give thanks to our household gods, our Lares and Penates. Their familiar shrine was in the entrance hall, and we went every day, to speak to the warm, loving spirits who watched over us. I did not look back, because I was a little bit scared that Nurse was not happy about the news, and I did not want to think about that. There was no way I was going to go to Rome, marry a stranger and live in a strange house without Nurse by my side.

  5.

  Childhood’s End

  Livia was jealous. She pretended she was sad to lose me, but she tore my nicest dress and said it was an accident, and she took delight in giving Nurse petty, humiliating orders in front of me. I did not dare say anything to her. Her family was wealthier than ours, and she was used to being in charge, and besides she was older than me. She wanted to know about Publius, though.